The teenage girl fight in Lakeland, Florida is pretty disturbing. Basically six girls pummeled one of their erstwhile friends and fellow cheerleader after being insulted by some (possibly forged) myspace postings of the victim. “Demarcus” even said she did it, according to audio of the video. In the wake of this event, facile explanations focusing on myspace and youtube have ignored the larger cultural factors involved including the rise of lower class standards among society as a whole.

There are probably even fewer fights among white suburbanites than there were 20 or 40 years ago. I don’t think myspace or camcorders are to blame of this and other fights. What’s changed, I think, is any sense of fair play and proportionality.

In the past, fights were one-on-one, no weapons, and there was some sense of a “fair fight.” I know this from personal experience and my dad’s numerous tales of growing up in an Irish neighborhood in NYC in the 60s. The tribal ways of our new neighbors and lowest classes are spreading, particularly among the young, with their high regard for superfluous achievements like “keeping it real,” i.e., ghetto authenticity. Imagine how much more disturbing a video of the sucker-punching brutes in the Jena Six case would be, if it were extant.

I also think we need to look at some individual factors as far as these girls and this neighborhood is concerned. Lakeland has some trashy areas, where blue collar people close to the earth aren’t afraid to throw down.

And, frankly, these particular girls all look sorta funny . . . . like “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome” funny. I’m not joking. This is a disease associated with violence and poor impulse control. Notice the wide set eyes, dull expressions, thin upper lips, and small chins on all but the first girl Take a look:

Of all the civil rights cause celebres of my lifetime, the Jena Six case stands out in its disregard for decency. Of course, we’ve seen worse, including the rallying of black “civil rights leaders” around the Hi-Fi Murderers and Huey Newton. But the Jena Six case is pretty bad: these are thugs with no excuse for their criminal behavior; they’ve made a big show of the “noose” pranks of other students (a prank involving students other than the victim) as a smoke screen for their severe beating of a white kid. At the time, I wrote:

But I don’t understand why–when the crime in question was so violent and brutal, and one of the accused had a prior record, and we can be certain this will someday blow up in everyone’s faces when one of these obviously violent “youths” gets a murder or armed robbery rap–so many people are earnestly showing their support, as if these guys were wrongly accused or something? They’re guilty at the very least of aggravated battery and deserve to do a few years in the penitentiary.

Since then, one of the six has pled guilty of aggravated battery, and another was arrested in Texas for beating up a fellow student. These kids are dirt bags, not heroes, and it’s stupid for blacks and liberal whites to make them out to be anything more than that. There is no “noose scourge” in America today, unless pranks and threats are the equal of real crimes. When blacks are crime victims, as they are all too often, they are almost always victims of other blacks. Whites form no insignificant portion of their victims too. This is the real social problem that civil rights groups should be devoting their energies to, the breakdown of the black family and the explosion of black crime, not phantom menaces such as nooses, the KKK, and imaginary white racists.

According to the ideology of “anti-racism” promoted by those who currently dominate the media, public schools, academia and “activist” organizations,blacks cannot, by definition, be guilty of racism, whereas whites are,by definition, racist. All blacks, no matter how rich, are victims, while all whites, no matter how poor, are privileged. Got it? . . . .

Oddly, the majority of people who call themselves “anti-racists” are themselves white. And they are at times openly racist towards law-abiding blacks and blacks who do not hate whites sufficiently, particularly black Republicans and conservatives.

Sounds crazy? That’s because this stuff is crazy.Virtually all Americans have encountered “anti-racism,” aka “multiculturalism” and “diversity education,” in one form or another, most explicitly through diversity training in workplaces and educational institutions. In diversity training, whites are racially abused by vicious, dishonest trainers, who make a good living doing this.

Hate pays.

We live in a world where massive disparities in inter-racial crime go unreported and vicious black-on-white crimes are subject to a media blackout. At the same time, phantom menaces such as the Great Noose Scourge of 2007 are given marquee treatment on CNN and other media outlets. The Noose Scourge, mind you, consists of juvenile acts of vandalism and taunting, which I concede may be racist in origin, but so far these incidents have included no violence whatsoever. This species of youthful vandalism–including such “hate crimes” as toilet-papering a house of an unpopular student–is fundamentally juvenile, obnoxious, and, almost 100% of the time, completely harmless.

I must correct my statement that the Noose Scourge has not been violent. Rather, the only incident of violence related to the Great Noose Scourge consists of the brutal beating of a lone white student by a gang of thuggish black students in Jena, Louisiana in a crime that has mutatis mutandis become a symbol of white racism because it was supposedly in retaliation for the offensive noose tied months earlier by an entirely different group of white students.

I think this sober round up of the facts about the Jena Six case by a local reporter is pretty telling. Essentially, most of the myths, images, and interpretations proffered by the mainstream media in this case had little to do with reality, just as in the Duke Lacrosse case, e.g.:

Nowhere in any of the evidence [implicating the Jena Six], including statements by witnesses and defendants, is there any reference to the noose incident that occurred three months prior. This was confirmed by the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, Donald Washington, on numerous occasions.

The culture is sick. It is sick with misplaced guilt, alienation, disregard for standards, and confused priorities. The Jena Six is a great example. Two of their members, whose claim to fame consisted of pummeling a white boy who “dissed” them at school, were recently honored by BET and given recognition at a music awards show. At the same time, down the road in New Orleans, the District Attorney’s office in this crime-ridden city has been paralyzed by a huge judgment against the (black) DA for firing almost all of the office’s white workers some years ago.

And yet in the face of these offenses–ranging from the violent to the merely venal–the media persists in its hoary view that white racism is still a major problem in this country. This aversion to unpleasant facts unfortunately enables an endemic culture of corruption and violence among the very Black Americans that the media is trying to help. This stupid denial of reality fuels a demoralized, cynical, and alienated division of blacks and whites even though most of the major evils of yesteryear–slavery, Jim Crow, lynching–were abandoned before most of us were born.

One lesson is clear from Jena: Ignore the media at your peril. The military, prosecutors, Ken Starr, and many others have learned this lesson repeatedly. Talk to the media and they may distort what you say, but say nothing and you’ll get run over by opponents. CNN’s melodramatic focus on the “schoolyard fight” and the “wrong side of the tracks” in its special report on Jena, Louisiana added to the smokescreen set up by the defendants to distract us from what this case is really about: a brutal beatdown of a young man for “dissing” that had nothing to do with the infamous “noose incident” months earlier.

Prosecutor Reed Walters finally had something to say in today’s New York Times. Clearly, if he had been more forthright and persuasive earlier, his town might not have been inundated with pissed off protesters:

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

One noticeable trend among various blogs and media sources discussing the Jena Six incident is the declining respect for free speech principles among many Americans. While many liberal-minded observers were concerned when a disruptive speaker at a John Kerry event was forcibly arrested, many of these same folks have reflexively reacted to racist speech in Jena by asking how it can be criminally prosecuted. Now, such speech has little value. I also agree that there comes a point where things like cross burnings and nooses can be considered terrorist threats. But hate speech itself, without some showing that there is a credible threat, is clearly protected under the First Amendment. First Amendment law does not countenance “content based” classifications of prohibited speech. Outside of very narrow circumstances, speech should be considered protected no matter how offensive.

The “slippery slope” is European-style anti-racism laws, where innocuous and nonthreatening criticisms of immigrant criminality and Muslim extremism, among other things, have led to criminal prosecution. Such varied figures as David Irving and Bridget Bardot have been caught within their grasp. Such laws contain all the problems ordinarily attributed to censorship: straight-jacketing of thought, arbitrary and selective prosecutions, and giving the government (and its majority) the power to suppress dissent.

But the question is not just one of law but also one of culture. As Americans, we used to understand instinctually that some people won’t like you, that free speech laws demand a free speech culture, and that the best response to offensive speech was not criminal prosecutions and veiled threats of violence–i.e., “No Justice, No Peace”. Rather, a free speech culture demands in response to offensive content more speech explaining, refuting, and ostracizing those who are wrong-headed or evil-minded or both. The times are changing. The widespread Marxism of our higher education system and its rhetoric of systematic oppression have pervaded the culture. Liberalism has fully subordinated liberty to equality. And equality itself has been subordinated to the Marxist principle of class justice, reparations, and the other rubrics of social revolution. This trend is entirely un-American and far more pervasive and dangerous than the death gasps of white supremacists in the Deep South.

All the big Democratic Party politicians are lining up to condemn the “injustice” in Jena. I feel like I’ve gone back in time to the Seventies.

The injustice was that the prosecutor was tough on crime and pursued attempted murder charges when a group of six black boys kicked another boy (who was white) on the ground until he was unconscious. The victim was guilty of the crime of having “dissed” one of the offenders. This particular incident was the culmination of many weeks of racial tension in the town after the group of thugs–which included one with a lengthy criminal record–sat under a tree at the local high school that was traditionally a white hangout on campus. The local rednecks responded by hanging some nooses from the tree as an obvious threat. Now this stuff is all real redneck and foreign to me. I don’t like provocative racists, and I don’t like thuggish crooks.

But I don’t understand why when the crime in question was so violent and brutal, and one of the accused had a prior record, and we can be certain this will someday blow up in everyone’s faces when one of these obviously violent “youths” gets a murder or armed robbery rap, that so many people are earnestly showing their support as if these guys were wrongly accused or something? They’re guilty at the very least of aggravated battery and deserve to do a few years in the penitentiary.

Well, on second thought, I do know the reason: to describe these criminals as the victims fits the liberal script.